Tag: ai

You know I’m a lady’s man but nestled between chats with Green Party candidate Catherine and our forthcoming one with Kerry of Labour, I’m with the Liberal Democrat candidate for Melksham-Devizes, Brian Mathew. So no flirting this time, straight political chat!

Obviously not as handsome as me, but Brian is one wise gent with a fascinating backstory, and he’s highly likely to be our MP! He can talk for England, but rather than Fishy Rishi’s desperately inane whimpering, everything he said warmed me to the idea of putting my cross in the yellow box. It was intelligent, reflective and held an air of compassion.

Fresh from a previous interview where he expressed their questions were rather standard, he was off waffling policies like a greyhound out of the trap before I even poured the milk into my tea! Imagine his surprise when I interjected, “so, question one; you’re going to win this, right?!”

“Well, it would be amazing if I did, wouldn’t it? Yeah!” was his response, perhaps wishing he’d gone on Newsnight instead. I didn’t waiver, continuing with the thought it would be as historical as the Battle of Roundway! Brian believed there was a previous Liberal who won; story checks out, albeit the last time Conservatives lost the original Devizes constituency it was to a Liberal called Eric MacFadyen, in 1923!

Clearly there’s work to be done, but after a few minutes I was convinced, Brian was the chap to do it, and he added the fact this was a new constituency. “I mean whereas in the past it was one Devizes and the hinterland to the East, now it’s the West, stretching all the way to Box and Colerne,” he said, “which is where I’m butcher councillor, down to Bradford-on-Avon, which is pretty solidly Lib Dem across to Melksham where we’ve won the last five town council elections, and then over to here and the Lavingtons.”

He discredited my suspicions it was a Tory strategic moving of the goalposts. “The Boundary Commission are independent, right? So their priority is to get every constituency in the UK to have the same number of people. You know, seventy-odd thousand. So that’s why they’ve done this shift.” But is Brian happy with it?

“I was to start with. Everyone was up in arms in Box, thinking ‘we don’t want to lose where we were.’ In that neck of the woods, of course, they see themselves as part of the Cotswolds, which they are, but now I’ve got selected, I’m rather enjoying this new constituency. In fact, I’ve never had so much fun in an election! Hope I’m allowed to say that?! But seriously, I’ve stood several times before; first in 2010, against Liam Fox in North Somerset.”

He continued, “after that I disappeared and went back to what I do for a living.” Brian is an engineer, and he told me about running Water Aid in Tanzania, “but they wanted someone to help with their programme in East Timor, so I went for a year and a half, and it was just delightful.”

A lengthy yet fascinating story he relayed, about putting in water schemes through the mountains with World Vision, their ongoing political struggles, their brief independence and invasion by Indonesia, and how he returned to see how the project had helped the mountain farmers there. “People would walk down into the valley,” he informed, “it was usually the children and mothers who would do this, and then walk all the back way up carrying water on their heads, which was usually filthy, and they’d end up with kids with diarrhoea and all kinds. We were putting in water supplies through the mountains to reach communities that had never had a tap before. And what was lovely was going back there six months later and talking with one of the farmers.”

If my intentions of these chats are informal, with a focus on the candidates rather than the national politics you can read anywhere, I hadn’t suspected such an engaging and inspiring background, and it confirmed Brian was altruistic and respectable. Ergo, towards the end of our chat, when I asked him for his thoughts on a ceasefire in Palestine, here was chap who knows oppression and genocide firsthand. As an undergraduate Brian took a year out, to research herb and spice production in Egypt and Israel, the latter he resided in. “A lot of the time I was based on a kibbutz close to Gaza, which was attacked on October the 7th last year. I knew the families and the children that were murdered.”

Moving onto local affairs, healthcare was at the forefront. Brian is on Wiltshire Council, “although we haven’t run Wiltshire Council because we’ve been the minority,” he expressed, “we’ve been the opposition, we’ve been the tail that wags the Tory dog. So we we’ve come up with promising ideas; that’s the day job! This morning I was in Colerne, trying to sort out the problems with the surgery. I’ve collected the last of the signatures for the petition and this is to save a surgery up there. The doctors have been getting less and less money, and the costs have been going up and up. So they’re now faced with the horrible prospect of having to close one of their surgeries. But to show how committed they are, they have foregone two months’ worth of salary. They’ve not taken the money to keep the surgeries open. Now this is wrong, and this is a big part of the manifesto pledge, helping rural surgeries, and this is a rural area.”

The facilities in both Melksham and Devizes are hot on every candidate’s agenda. “The Melksham hospital has been closed. It’s now certainly been turned into houses. In Melksham a hospital is still there, but essentially what it’s become is an outreach place for mental health services for Oxford. You’ve got a rather ridiculous situation where people are turning up at the hospital, sometimes with quite bad injuries and expect them to be treated and they there’s no one to help them. So what I would like to see is an injuries unit.” I’m going to throw in the ‘how do we fund it curveball!’

“Our manifesto means new spending around 28 billion on areas, health, education, housing, child poverty, and reversing cuts to the army and aid. So that’s what we want to do. And we said we would raise 28 billion through measures such as reversing the cuts to tax on banks. The banks have benefited the tune of something like 50 billion, right? We’re talking about four billion of that, please. But it’s not everything, taxing oil and gas firms, and that’s really to look at the issue of dealing with the changing way people deal with energy. So it’s a one-off tax on them.”

Brian also spoke of taxing social media. “Specifically we’d like to see a mental health expert in every school. Look at the harm that social media does to kids,” and frequent flyers too, “basically, to encourage people not to fly so much. And reforming capital gains tax.”

As with the Greens, eating the rich might force multinational companies to move away, I put to Brian, and thought it was tremendously conservative for me! He used a comparison to post Second World War relationships between employer and employee, and today’s. “The differential between them, was something like ten times. You look at the amount bosses are getting paid now and it’s just ridiculous. So you’re talking about thousands of times more than the people at the bottom; you know that’s all wrong. And when you’ve got a situation like that, it’s wrong for society. It’s not healthy. So I don’t have a problem with seeing that.”

I point out my socialist trait to my daughter, that there’s enough money to go around, it’s the unjust distribution of it. “Yeah,” Brian replied, “absolutely.” It was all going so well, then I put my foot in it with the B-word, and my teapot was empty! If we’ve become right and left-wing extremities, Brexit has driven the divide, and perhaps middle-road Liberal unity is what’s required. “Yeah,” Brian said, “there’s a lovely phrase which I really like, and that is when will people realise that the leftwing and the right-wing belong to the same bird? We are one society and can’t be divided. We have been divided, and then you mentioned Brexit, and what a horrible thing it was, you know, in terms of the way it’s absolutely driven a knife through the middle of us.”

Brexit stance surely divides Liberal from Conservative, and while there’s another far-right option with Reform, I’d consider dangerous, does Brian think they’ll take a certain number of Conservative voters? “On the issue of Conservative voters, what we are finding is a general disgust amongst people who traditionally always voted Conservative.” He highlighted the PPE scandal. “People were making hand over fist money within the government. Those things stick in the throat of decent people. And I think because of that, we’re now seeing a lot of Conservatives flipping to us, and they are doing it in the way that a smoker who gives up smoking becomes evangelical about it. It’s wonderful. It’s quite something to see!”

And Brexit? “We’re a pro-European party, right? We are Europeans whether we it or not, and that’s a fact. Personally, I think Brexit was a was a mistake, but it’s happened. It created horrible divisions in society, but we must work our way forward. Farmers now are faced with a situation where they can’t export to Europe. our manufacturers can’t export to Europe. Our food processors can’t export to Europe. That is just ridiculous. And at the same time, well, the government has kind of been allowing a lot of stuff from Europe to come through. And now they’re starting to tighten up. On that, we’re not with them. These are our friends, and we should be trading with them.”

Strategic voting to get the Tories out, we talked on next. Is every goal a goal to Brian, or does he prefer voters to vote with who they support?

“It’s not good for this country to have them there anymore,” he said of the ruling party. “But the only way for that to happen essentially, is for people to pull together in this constituency, that means you’ve got look at the whole of Wiltshire, right? Look where the Wiltshire councillors are. You’ve got three Labour councillors in Salisbury: that’s it. If Labour was so popular across the whole county, you’d find them all over the place, but you only find them in Salisbury, and of course in Swindon, which is in its own borough.”

Again, the idea of coalition felt alien. “The problem with coalitions generally, and you can see this right across Europe, is wherever you’ve got a big party and a small party, the small party is the one that gets the blame.” Dammit, I brought up Nick Clegg, now I’m never getting the next bus home!

“Totally. And we were destroyed. A lot depends on the amount of influence that we’ll have. If we managed to win enough seats and we form, if you like, the bridge between in the middle, then we might have something called confidence and supply, which means we will vote with the government when we agree with the government. And we will vote against them when we don’t agree. But it would also mean that we wouldn’t have any cabinet ministers. Then you’ve got collective responsibility, and then you end up with horrible battles going on within government. And apparently that’s what happened when we were in bed with the Tories. There were arguments every day.”

Trying to turn the tide back local, Brian told me about a project he was proud as a councillor to have achieved, called Shared Lives. “It’s adoption for adults,” he explained, “specifically for adult social care that could be for retired people, or people with learning difficulties. Adult social care is the one of the biggest things that we all spend our Council tax on. It’s not the roads, it’s not other things, it’s adult social care and indeed, social care for kids as well. That is a massive part of what Wiltshire Council does now. So the idea behind Shared Lives is that a couple of carers can take them into their home, and they get paid by the Council.”

Although Brian would and could talk politics in layman’s terms, and had a convincing argument in each case, it was throughout our chat I felt he favoured discussing these varied and often extreme projects and charity-based motions he both supported and actively engaged in. We rapped Universal Credit, how they’d like to see proportional representation, and how he didn’t think a PCC was needed, though he praised Wilkinson for targeting hair coursing. Housing, well, that’s another story.  

“What we’re saying is increasing new homes to 380,000 new homes a year and including in that is 150,000 social homes a year, through new garden cities and community LED developments. We’re talking about banning no fault evictions. Making three-year tenancies a default. And creating a National Register of licenced landlords. So we want to see where people do have a landlord. The landlord doesn’t treat them badly.” Young people getting on the ladder, right to buy, got us onto Margaret Thatcher, Pandora’s boxers!

Yet it was a surprisingly brief hurdle, Brian saying she “got” climate change, and thus I could swiftly move onto this. Brain wrote the motion which got Wiltshire Council to acknowledge the climate emergency. Against the sewage leakage scandal, he acknowledged but also praised Wessex Water for installation of “a massive tank system for example, brought from Maven. So that means that, when you’ve got heavy rainfall, when water is going into the sewer, it’s held in the tank before, and gets processed and then it goes into the river.”

He was up on environmental issues, had worked with Wilshire Climate Alliance, and even Extinction Rebellion, I even liked his take on education reform. Brian slipped on nothing, I could’ve thrown a banana skin under his loafers, and he’d probably glide around it telling me a story of how he once saved a jungle of monkeys from deforestation!

School trusts need a kick into touch, it’s ludicrous to even call them Trusts, and yet again, Brian had a supportive take on how to solve the issue, but not without mentioning, “when I worked in Zimbabwe, I remember visiting a school in the Eastern Highlands that was supported by German Stiftung, which was an Education Foundation……!!” I wondered when the last bus home was, but was kind of in awe of the guy, and found his stories relevant and fascinating. Brian has the experience and compassion to walk into an MP role like Heston Blumenthal could a job in McDonalds, it’s just a case of putting your faith in a middle-road party amidst the pandemonium of a divided country and a government corrupt to the core, which people here are still putting up posters for!

That said, I’m remain in a dilemma, and I’ve got Labour’s hopeful, Kerry Postlewhite to chat with next, which incidentally, I’ve already done, and I really liked her too; I’m such a suck-up! Still, a consensus of a “who do we vote for” Facebook debate on a rare freedom of expression Devizes group, suggested they were all the same “shit.” I beg to differ, now I’ve had the honour of chatting with them personally. A vote for either Brian, Kerry or Catherine is a vote well spent; deciding on which one is the trickiest part.

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